Authors Like Mahatma Gandhi

Leo Tolstoy

Russian · b. 1828 · Novelist and moralist

After War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy turned to a radical Christianity built on the Sermon on the Mount and on refusing to meet evil with force. The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) argues that a true Christian cannot serve a state that rests on violence. In December 1908 he answered an Indian nationalist, Taraknath Das, with “A Letter to a Hindu”, which Gandhi translated into Gujarati and printed in Indian Opinion in 1909, beginning a short correspondence that lasted until Tolstoy's death in 1910.

John Ruskin

English · b. 1819 · Critic and essayist

Ruskin was the leading art critic of Victorian England before he turned on its economics. Unto This Last appeared as essays in the Cornhill Magazine from August 1860, was stopped after four instalments because of the hostile response, and came out as a book in May 1862. Its argument is that the labourer's work has the same value as the lawyer's, and that wealth means nothing apart from the lives it supports.

Henry David Thoreau

American · b. 1817 · Essayist

Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail in 1846 for refusing to pay a poll tax that supported slavery and the war with Mexico, and turned the experience into a lecture published in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government”, later known as “Civil Disobedience”. Walden (1854) is the account of his two years living alone in a cabin he built at Walden Pond.

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Martin Luther King Jr.

American · b. 1929 · Minister and activist

King was a Baptist minister who led the Montgomery bus boycott and became the central figure of the American civil rights movement; he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and assassinated in Memphis in 1968. From 3 February to 18 March 1959 he travelled through India, met Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi's surviving colleagues, and wrote it up as “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi”. In 1991 a Boston University committee found that he had plagiarised parts of his doctoral dissertation; the university did not revoke the degree.

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B. R. Ambedkar

Indian · b. 1891 · Jurist and social reformer

Ambedkar was born into an untouchable Mahar family, earned doctorates in New York and London, and chaired the committee that drafted independent India's constitution. In 1932 Gandhi fasted against the separate electorates Ambedkar had won for the untouchable castes, and Ambedkar gave them up in the Poona Pact. Annihilation of Caste was written as a speech for a Lahore reform society in 1936; when the organisers asked for cuts he refused, the conference was cancelled, and he printed the text himself. Gandhi answered in Harijan, and Ambedkar's reply was added to the 1937 edition.

Rabindranath Tagore

Indian · b. 1861 · Poet and novelist · Nobel 1913

Tagore was a Bengali poet, novelist, composer and educator who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first writer from outside Europe to do so, and founded a school at Santiniketan. He and Gandhi first met there on 6 March 1915, and Tagore was among the first to call him “Mahatma”. The Home and the World (1916) is a novel about a Bengali household divided by the swadeshi boycott that followed the 1905 partition of Bengal.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Indian · b. 1889 · Statesman and historian

Nehru was Gandhi's chosen political heir and India's first prime minister, from 1947 until his death in 1964. He wrote An Autobiography in prison between June 1934 and February 1935, and it was published in London in 1936. The Discovery of India, a history of the country written during his imprisonment in Ahmednagar Fort, followed in 1946.

Nelson Mandela

South African · b. 1918 · Statesman

Mandela joined the African National Congress in the 1940s and led its campaigns of defiance against apartheid laws, before co-founding its armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961. He spent twenty-seven years in prison, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F. W. de Klerk in 1993, and became South Africa's first democratically elected president in 1994. Long Walk to Freedom, published that year, is his autobiography.

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Thich Nhat Hanh

Vietnamese · b. 1926 · Zen teacher

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Zen monk who coined the term “engaged Buddhism” in Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. He met Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966, and in 1967 King nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Barred from returning to Vietnam after a peace mission abroad, he lived in exile for thirty-nine years, founding the Plum Village community in France in 1982; he died in Huế in 2022.

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Wangari Maathai

Kenyan · b. 1940 · Activist and memoirist

Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in 1977, organising rural women to plant trees, and was repeatedly arrested for opposing the government of Daniel arap Moi. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace. Unbowed, her memoir, was published in 2006.

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